Seattle vs. PDX: Data Shows More Portlanders Moving to Emerald City

Let’s be honest. It’s pretty fun to make jokes at Portland’s expense. Whether it’s the fixie bikes, their inferior soccer team, or just some rehashed Portlandia reference (see below), Portland makes for a pretty good punch line most of the time.

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And as Gene Balk of the Seattle Times touched on this morning, Seattle has one more area where it can claim superiority over the Rose City. According to stats from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, recently more Portlanders have been moving to Seattle than Seattleites to Portland.

Between 2002 and 2009 — the most recent data available — about six percent more Portland residents made the move to Seattle than the reverse. That isn’t an enormous difference, true. But keep in mind that our metro area is larger by more than one million people, so as a percentage of the total population, Portland’s migration to Seattle is significantly larger than Seattle’s to Portland.

And it wasn’t always this way. In seven out of 10 years prior to 2002, more Seattleites moved to Portland than the reverse. In fact, Portland imported 17 percent more Seattleites than it exported between 1992 and 1994.